Showing posts with label budget. Show all posts
Showing posts with label budget. Show all posts

Monday, May 11, 2015

Select your strategic approach carefully in social engagement - Treasury faltering at Census-like approach

Imitation is often referred to as the sincerest form of flattery, however the attempt by the Treasury to mimic the success of Census Australia's lighthearted Twitter approach demonstrates how carefully agencies must consider their social strategies in light of public opinion.

Many will remember when the ABS launched its Census Twitter campaign with an engagement styled to help make census numbers relevant to the average Australian using humour and cleverly written tweets.

The @2011Census account (now @CensusAustralia) attracted enormous public and media attention across Australia and internationally, and there was a significant increase in Census completion rates (though a number of initiatives would have helped contribute to this).

The ABS even went so far as to 'Rickroll' its followers, a sign of a government agency so comfortable with its own communication and audience that it could engage them playfully and without fear.

It was a brilliant strategy (well done Michelle), breaking the mold for government social engagement.

Now The Treasury is attempting a similar strategy on Twitter, however is receiving a very different reaction and engagement from the public.

The Treasury is a relative newcomer to social engagement, having first tweeted in July 2012. Being one of the more formal and less public-facing government agencies it took longer for The Treasury to make a decision that a social presence was safe and needed to support its external engagement activities.

However when it leapt into social, it did so with both feet, using Twitter to announce and engage on tax reform consultations and highlight its very important activities, which rarely receive public attention. 

The agency did suffer some of the usual starting pains of new organisational social users, not using hashtags, avoiding engagement with other users and generally treating Twitter as a broadcast feed resembling a news ticker, however they've grown more interactive of late and look more comfortable on the platform.

This year The Treasury has taken an additional step - taking a leaf out of the ABS's book to engage more proactively around the organisation's most significant annual event, bringing down the Australian Government Budget.

Using factoids, like the Tweet below, the agency is seeking to engage Australians in a more human and interactive way.


Now this is a good thing, and speaks to the growing confidence of the agency on social channels. It's not easy for conservative organisations to 'let go' and allow themselves to engage in less formal and more human ways.

However the specific strategy The Treasury is using runs a large risk of backfiring on the agency.

The ABS could take a very interactive and light approach with the Census to make it relevant to Australians for the very reason that it wasn't especially relevant to many of them.

Few people had strong views about the Census process, either negative or positive. It only occurs once every five years, it has no discernable impact on people's lives the rest of the time and, while completing a census form was inconvenient for some people, it didn't really trigger a strong opposing reaction.

Essentially the ABS approach helped make the Census relevant to people, taking it from a position of irrelevance.

The Treasury is in a very different position with the Australian Government Budget.

The Budget is one of the most significant government activities each year. It is comprehensively covered by the media and is seen as a defining moment for governments, used by the public to judge their performance and their future.

Decisions in the budget affect every Australian, often in very personal and direct ways. Some see their lifestyles improve, others see them falter. It is extensively leaked and discussed ahead of its release, and the shockwaves it can send through the Australian economy can profoundly shape how the government and Australia are perceived globally and locally.

In the case of the current budget, much of the public still feel wounded from last year's budget, which saw a number of budget measures not passed and the government have to take steps back in a number of areas.

The government has taken steps to 'defuse' concerns over the current budget, and have done a good job of leaking key measures ahead of its release to assay some of the community's fears regarding its impact on their lives.

However it probably isn't the right environment to replicate the ABS census strategy - the differences in the public's starting views towards Census 2011 and Budget 2015 are enormous.

As such it looks to me as if The Treasury has perhaps become too ambitious in its approach to budget social engagement this year - a view that's being supported by the types of comments the agency is receiving on its account.

For example, The Treasury's latest tweet deals with the amount of M&Ms consumed by their Budget division staff in the weeks leading up to the budget (image below).


While the tweet, coming from the ABS Census account, would likely be well-received, coming from The Treasury it is interpreted in quite a different manner.

While it has decent retweets, the responding comments suggest that the agency doesn't (yet) have the same license to be as light and engaging as the ABS.

The tweet suggests to me the very public social mistake by Qantas a few weeks after it grounded its fleet. The #QantasLuxury campaign turned into an opportunity for the public to vent their anger.

The Treasury is risking a similar backlash to what could be seen as self-indulgent and commercial tweets, such as the one portrayed above. 

Talking about their staff's consumption of a brand of chocolate treats, or otherwise being light-hearted in engagement is not the best strategy at a time when the public is waiting in trepidation at the impact on their lives from the budget.

For the ABS a high engagement, high risk strategy had limited downside, for The Treasury there's far more potential risk and far less reward - although this tweet did get the gong as the most engaging government tweet in Australia for 10 May 2015 from Great Oz Gov Tweets (which I helped establish).

It's a bold strategy for The Treasury, and I hope it pays off, but in future the agency need to more carefully consider the environment they operate in and the profile of their subject matter, not simply their own desire to communicate and connect.

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Thursday, August 14, 2014

NSW highlights open data as one of four focuses in the Premier's Innovation Initiative

The NSW government today launched the NSW Premier's Innovation Initiative, a program seeking expressions of interest in projects that support NSW government innovation in four focal areas - Congestion, Social Housing Assets, Open Ideas and Open Data.

The process will invite organisations and individuals to submit Expressions of Interest setting out proposals the government could consider in one or more focal area.

Following this, selected respondents will be invited to submit full proposals for funding and implementation consideration.

While this process is far more complex and bureaucratic that similar processes I've seen run in the US, UK and other nations , it is great to see a government in Australia taking the step to formally ask the community for ideas and proposals to improve aspects of the state and government.

The inclusion of Open Data is quite notable. This looks like a genuine and sophisticated attempt to accelerate the NSW open data agenda, involving the consumers of the data in the process of defining what data is released and how.

Given the significant economic value attributed to opening up public sector data it is good to see both the attention and the funding placed behind this initiative - in too many cases we see only one, or neither of these, with open data catalogues run on a shoestring and their managers required to cajole and beg government agencies into participating by supplying data.

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Tuesday, July 01, 2014

Guest post: Unlocking Budget Data in Australia: the BudgetAus Collaboration

Republished with permission from the International Budget Partnership blog

This post was written by Rosie Williams of InfoAus.

Unlocking Budget Data in Australia: the BudgetAus Collaboration

Budget transparency in Australia has recently taken a big step forward with the first ever release of federal budget data in machine readable format. Prior to this year, budget data in Australia had been locked away in PDF and Word documents. While these publications met the broad guidelines for reporting government spending to the public, analysis of government spending remained a difficult and time consuming process.

Providing information is one thing, making it usable is yet another.

Unlocking the data

As a novice programmer with a degree in sociology and background in activism, I decided to address this problem by creating a web tool that would allow users to explore the entire federal budget. The website — BudgetAus — works in much the same way as a search engine: users can search for their areas of interest to see how much money the government is spending, regardless of the agency or portfolio in which the spending occurs.

The original site was built from budget data that I manually copied and pasted from the existing PDF’s published by the government. The following year we tried to program scripts to scrape the data, but this proved too time consuming. The complexity of the data contained within the documents, and the fact that the documents presented information in different ways and were not broken down to the same level, proved challenging.

Behind the scenes, people had been working within government to release budget data in machine readable formats (as data files). However, they faced the same set of challenges – inconsistencies in the way the data was organized by different agencies made them unsuitable for use by programmers.
A budget visualization created using BudgetAus data. From Arthur Street’s Australian Budget Explorer.

Building a network

Having established my interest in budget transparency over the past year or so, I found a small network of people with a strong interest in what I was attempting. This network includes experts who work on the federal budget, veteran journalists, and professional programmers.

With the first release of machine-readable budget data imminent, we made a big push to have this data reformatted and made consistent with the requirements of BudgetAus and similar projects. This was no easy task, with a team working overnight with the Excel tables contributed by each of 180 agencies to produce line item data in a suitable format.

Going public

Getting the data is only one requirement of a successful budget transparency project. Engaging the wider public with the purpose of having access to the data is also crucial. I used a budget night event to find collaborators willing to put the budget data to use. With the help of some prominent independent journalists, Wendy Bacon and Margo Kingston, the BudgetAus collaboration, as it has become known, spent budget night using social media to find out what sort of budget questions people wanted answered.

Wendy set up a Question Bank on GitHub – an online, open source collaboration tool. This seems to be functioning quite well for public discussion of budget transparency questions. Some developers in our network set up a data visualization repository to support this and future efforts by coders and citizen bloggers to produce meaningful graphs and visualizations based on open data.

Everyone played complimentary roles, from the budget experts who providedbackground on the nitty-gritty of budget questions, to the media and our coders. Collaborators seemed to fall quite naturally into their respective functions.

Where to from here?

Based on this years’ experience of working with BudgetAus, the government is now designing a standard way for agencies to report spending.

While BudgetAus and its collaborators have helped to shine a light on the important issue of data consistency, there is much work that remains to be done. Answering questions such as how spending promises (estimates) differ from actual spending, and how different political parties make changes to public spending, will require retrospective data that is so far not available. To continue to build on the success of the project will require funding the formalization of a group working on these issues.

In the end it took leaders within government, the respective agencies, citizen journalists, citizen hackers, and the general public to begin a functioning budget transparency project. I hope that this is just a beginning.

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Thursday, May 15, 2014

Giving the community an opportunity to understand and reshape the Australian Government budget for 2014-15

While common practice in many countries overseas, there's still limited authentic consultation on government budgets undertaken in Australia - and I think we're poorer for it.

Involving the community in setting budget priorities and educating them on how a budget is developed goes a long way towards building understanding and (very importantly) trust in public institutions and politicians.

Even if these processes are only used for informational or even political ends, such as Strong Choices in Queensland, they at least give the public visibility into the challenges that governments contend with.

Of course budget processes are far more valuable when they give people authentic opportunities to influence government decisions, but one step at a time.

With so little public consultation undertaken around the Australian Government's budget for 2014-15, I've worked with Fairfax Media this year to give the Australian public an opportunity to understand how it is constructed and provide their views.


Via my company Delib Australia, we've modelled budget revenues and expenditures in Budget Simulator and made this available via the Sydney Morning Herald's site.

The Australian Budget Simulator is open until the end of next week, at which point we'll be tallying up the feedback and presenting it to the Australian Government for review.

It's not likely to change any decisions, but at least it will help inform the discussion.

To share your views via the Australian Budget Simulator, visit: www.smh.com.au/business/federal-budget-2014/budgetsimulator/

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Thursday, April 18, 2013

Why should governments be open and transparent in their budgets

I'm speaking at the eGovernment Summit today on how Australia is performing in the open government stakes, and what are the benefits of openness to government.

As a reference I reviewed the 2012 Open Budget Survey (infographic right), released in January this year, which provides valuable insights into why openness in budgeting is important and which nations are doing well.

The Survey points out openness is important in overcoming public sector corruption, helps government manage debt, helps build foreign investment and trade, provides access to cheaper capital for infrastructure and assists in building trust with citizens.

The 2012 Survey found that the world has a long way to go towards government openness, at least in budgetary terms. It found that the national budgets of 77 of the 100 countries assessed, countries that are home to half the world’s population, failed to meet basic standards of budget transparency. Only one nation, South Korea, was considered strong.

Australia was not assessed in this Open Budget Survey and, based on other measures, already does reasonably well in making our Commonwealth and State budgets open to citizen understanding and scrutiny.

However the question we should always ask is how can we do better?

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Monday, February 13, 2012

What's the value of your social media followers?

Social media followers and fans are not particularly good metric for judging the success or ROI of a social media campaign and I'd advise strongly against measuring success through these numbers alone.

However as businesses attach a commercial value to their mailing and email lists, as a corporate asset, I thought it would still be interesting to look at what might be the value of a social media following.

While it may not be legal to sell such an asset, it can contain value in providing a cheap way to reach part of your audience quickly and conveniently. In fact, I have railed before about organisations who pour money into building a social media following for a campaign, then throw their investment away by closing it down or neglecting it - just as they are used to doing in traditional media when renting eyeballs.

So as a starting point for calculations of social media value I put together a little spreadsheet on Google to allow you to calculate a value based on several key social media networks and blogs. It uses research figures that have been calculated to average out the value of an individual follower or fan.

Just plug in your numbers in the boxes provided and see what you get.

Feel free to extend the spreadsheet as well.

If you cannot edit the embedded sheet below, try this link.

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Monday, January 09, 2012

Should governments be using popular VOIP tools for customer enquiries?

In Australia about 10% of households don't have a landline phone any more.

In some other countries the figure is higher - and it is growing as people abandon the 'fixed to one location' phone for personal mobile phones.

When calling a government agency - even a 'free call' line - there's often additional charges for mobile phones, plus time-based charges that don't apply on landlines.

In other words, for 10% of households it has become more expensive to call government agencies, particularly if they get put on hold.

True, losing the landline is a choice, however there's a choice for government agencies as well which can cut the cost - using VOIP services.

VOIP stands for Voice Over IP. In essence it involves using the internet to make phone calls.

Many government agencies have already adopted VOIP or VOIP-like phone exchanges inside their workplaces. This means that while phone calls still arrive at an agency via a POTS (plain old telephone service) system, once they arrive at the agency's switch they are directed onto a digital network which is far more customisable, flexible and cost-effective.

This means that when agencies make internal calls between offices (often across the continent), their calls don't go via the POTS network - those wires we see hanging from the inappropriately named 'telegraph' poles. Instead they get sent via the internet or on dedicated digital cables at a much lower cost to the agency.

Citizens can also take advantage of VOIP - whether using dedicated services like Skype or Engin, or through ISPs who offer VOIP calls via landlines. This also helps them save significant money on long-distance calls.

However these agency VOIP systems and citizen VOIP systems rarely overlap. Many agencies can't call citizens via VOIP and while citizens might attempt to use VOIP to call agencies, few can take the call.

My question is why?

How difficult would it be for an agency to establish a Skype number, which would allow citizens to use their home Skype connection to call the agency for free?

How difficult would it be to establish agency VOIP numbers on major domestic VOIP services, which allowed free calls to the agency. TransACT, Canberra's fibre-optic network provider (now owned by Internode) has been offering free calls between its VOIP subscribers for years.

Sure there are likely to be a few technical issues to sort out. Resolving this one would re-establish a free call option for that 10% of Australian households without landlines. Surely that has significant value.

Given that it appears that even rural doctors, when receiving Commonwealth Government funds to implement costly VOIP services are often setting up a free Skype account instead, there's undoubtedly some appetite for being able to call the government via these VOIP tools.

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Thursday, November 24, 2011

In traditional organisations, innovation often appears to happens at the wrong end of a gun

When I think back over the most well known innovation successes over the last few years, and I am not specifically referring to the public sector, an aspect that springs out at me is how often these innovations occurred during a major crisis or due to a funding crunch.

In other words, these innovations frequently happened when organisations were placed at the wrong end of a gun.

It appears to me that often these innovations only occurred, or were allowed to see the light of day, because the pressure put on organisations by environmental or internal changes altered the perceived risk of innovating to be less than the perceived risk of not innovating - "the ship is sinking anyway, so we might as well try something different.

This raises several major concerns for me. Firstly that some organisations are incredibly resistant to innovation and can place themselves, or their management, into unviable situations by not beginning to innovate soon enough.

Secondly if the leadership of an organisation can see this conservative at work but wish to see innovation occur they may draw the conclusion that they need to place the organisation in significant distress - cutting budgets or hoping for (stimulating?) an external crisis that threatens its future viability.

This places enormous stress on individuals, with all kinds of negative consequences.

Isn't it better for organisations to proactively institutionalize innovation and change processes? Become capable and willing to change before a crisis occurs? To make innovation a key strategy for organisational adaptation rather than a last resort when system failures are already well underway?

This would involve changing the view of innovation to be an activity that is rewarded as a behaviour and activity, rather than being one that is punished, except at the organisation's "death's door".

A few organisations have successfully integrated innovation into their DNA as a core driver of their success. I hope more do so in the future and, at a larger scale, more societies as well.

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Thursday, September 15, 2011

"Last in first out" - is this a risk for social media expertise and channel use in government?

I've seen (and spoken with colleagues about) a number of austerity measures taken in government agencies around Australia over the last few months.

With various governments across the country looking to cut spending to balance budgets, or at least reduce debt levels, lower 2011-12 budgets require many agencies to look long and hard at what they can trim or where they can do more for less (without affecting services to the public).

I wonder whether digital channels and expertise has been firmly enough established in many agencies to survive any cuts. Will management focus on their established infrastructure, maintaining their legacy IT systems and 'tried and true' communications and service channels at the expense of newer and more cost-effective, but less mature digital, channels?

In other words will we see the "last in, first out" rule apply for social media channels and expertise in many agencies?

(this is slightly rhetorical as I'm already seeing this in action in a few places)

I hope agencies will use any budget tightening as an opportunity to look long and hard at their operational effectiveness and select the channels which deliver the most 'bang for the buck' and long-term sustainability and viability.

Of course even if this means cutting non-digital channels in preference to digital, there is still a loss of expertise and corporate knowledge - though potentially a more sustainable one into the future.

Do you see signs that budget pressures are impacting on your agency's online capability? (feel free to respond anonymously & keep the relevant public service code of conduct in mind)

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Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Participatory budgeting - big in Europe and South America, but not in Australia - why?

One of the more curious things about Government 2.0 is how differently it is interpreted and delivered around the world.

For example the map below (clickthrough to more information at Google Maps) illustrates how widespread Participatory Budgeting (PB) is - an approach whereby a government allocates some or all of its budget based on direct citizen participation.

The practice has become extremely popular in Europe and in South America, however has not thrived in North America or Australia.

Is this due to different political conditions, cultural factors or Gov 2.0 maturity?

I'm not sure - I would welcome your thoughts.

However the differences do emphasise the breadth of Government 2.0 and the many uses it can be put to in a nation.

If you are interested in participatory budgeting, also see the Facebook group at: http://groups.to/pb/ and the post from Bang the Table exploring at 10 Ways Participatory Budgeting has been used Around the World.

Participatory Budgeting  Google map (click for more information)

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Friday, May 07, 2010

Emergency management with Gov 2.0

The internet has proven itself time and time again to be one of the fastest platforms of disseminating information during emergencies.

The latest example has been in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

One of the largest spills off the US coast in history (though far from being the largest in the world), the spill is now threatening the marine life and economic survival of sea-based industries in four US states.

To inform people about the unfolding emergency and share news as it happens, a group of companies involved with the spill and US government agencies has been operating a website and social media presence.

According to the article Oil Spill Social Media in Read Write Web, the group includes British Petroleum, who own the oil; Transocean, who own the rig; the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The social media presence includes a Facebook page for conversations, Twitter for announcements, Flickr for images and YouTube for videos - all linked off the main site, Deep Water Horizon Response.

This type of presence can be put together very quickly when an emergency occurs. There is no cost to any of the social media tools, and they can be in place within minutes.

The approach works very well at informing the public in a more reliable and factual way than, sometimes, traditional media allows.

Provided organisations are attuned and prepared to provide information rapidly, without onerous approval processes, second guessing or political concerns, social media can be a very powerful emergency management tool in the public sector's arsenal.

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Saturday, April 24, 2010

Launching banknotes via online video

In what I believe is a world first, the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing has launched its new US$100 note, featuring Benjamin Franklin, via an online video in YouTube.

Brought to my attention by Nicholas Gruen, the 82 second long production provides a clear view of all the security provisions included in the banknote.

There is also an interactive video quiz available for people who wish to learn about how to recognise the note.

The approach offers an innovative vision as to how countries around the world could market and communicate the features of their currency and stamps to their citizens.

Benjamin Franklin, as a former printer and scientist (one of the early pioneers in electricity), would have been proud.

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Monday, April 12, 2010

What value should government place on online expertise?

On Sunday I was made aware of a Seek advertisement for a 'web and social media expert' position in a 'VERY high-profile government client' in the ACT.

The ad (which is here), seeks someone with,

a strong understanding of how the web and social media operate, the ability to contextualise that within the Government’s needs and find creative solutions; and have the technical skills to transform those solutions into product within tight deadlines!

You will need excellent communication skills, and experience in website design and development and in project and database management. You will be proficient in using a range of web design applications including Adobe Photoshop, have a sound knowledge of HTML, and a strong understanding of web publishing principles and techniques.? Knowledge of relevant web standards and guidelines and community engagement practices are essential! Experience in multimedia authoring and video production would be a strong advantage.
This is a wide range of complex skills, so let's do some unpacking.

Being a 'social media expert' - if such actually exist in Australia - would require years of experience, not just book-learning and seminars, in employing social media techniques and technologies across diverse audiences.

Being a web designer is itself a profession, as is web development, project manager and multimedia and video production. All require years of experience to gain proficiency.

Together these skills would take upwards of fifteen years to gain - possibly twenty or more for a true expert.

In fact this role could easily be split into many separate career roles, each with a professional skillset, including online communications/social media professional, web designer, web developer, database administrator, project manager, multimedia producer)

So at what level does this ad indicate the government client will reward this combined skillset?

At the APS6 level - circa $70-80,000 salary per year.

I wish this agency all the best in finding the right person for this role, however I do feel that the compensation significantly under-values the formal skills they are seeking. The agency will probably have to choose someone without the level of expertise they want, simply because the person with the combined skills they are seeking either does not yet exist in Australia or would be seeking a much higher salary (and could get it simply by employing one of their skillsets).

This is a problem I have seen before in government. Often departments seek highly trained web designers or developers at salaries well below their commercial or digital agency equivalents.

Jobs asking for social media experts seem to hope that these people exist, whereas there has been limited opportunity for people to have gained these skills in Australia. The few professionals who have substantial experience in the social media field are generally freelancing, working in high paying (usually commercial sector) roles or have left Australia for greener fields overseas.

This isn't an issue just related to online skills. Government compensation packages sometime struggle to reward specialists and experts of all stripes, something highlighted in the recent APS reform report released by PM&C, Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for the Reform of Australian Government Administration.

I hope moving forward that Australian governments are in the position to acknowledge that there are many kinds of online professionals, that it is highly unlikely to get a full set of online skills in a single person and that these people need to be appropriately compensated for their expertise.

Otherwise we will remain caught in the trap of advertising for experts but being forced to employ 'learners'.

While these people are also needed (and will become more expert with time), they start out far more prone to error, require much greater training and external support and don't bring the same sized tool kit to the table to enable government to deliver the best possible outcomes for the community. In fact when placed in senior 'expert' positions these learners may cost the government much more over time in opportunity cost than the salary of a true expert.

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Monday, November 09, 2009

Collaboration within organisations increases productivity - new report

When I stepped into the public sector just over three years ago, in terms of workplace collaboration it was like stepping back twenty years.

I found that staff directories were merely lists of names, titles and phone numbers - without listing people's expertise, qualifications, experience, current projects and interests.

The only way to get to know and understand the skills of staff in most other areas was to discover them by word of mouth or meet them at work functions.

Collaboration was limited to face-to-face working groups, flying people around the country to attend meetings, or sending draft documents to others by email or on paper and asking for feedback. Sometime comments were returned written on document print-outs, in long-hand reminiscent of a doctor's prescriptions.

Even when document edits were tracked changes, compiling and reconciling the edits from different people in such a process could take days, if not weeks, before the document was ready to be recirculated for re-review.

While these collaboration systems were slow and clumsy, people - public servants - made them work. I worry about whether it also made best use of peoples' skills, departmental time and public money.

Recently Frost and Sullivan released a report which defined the productivity gains both public and commercial sector organisations can gain from more advanced collaboration techniques.

Reported in NextGov and titled Meetings Around the World II: Charting the Course of Advanced Collaboration (PDF), the report

surveyed 3,662 professionals in businesses and government agencies about their use of advanced collaboration tools such as voice-over-Internet Protocol, instant messaging or meeting via high-definition video to get their work done.
The report found that these collaborative tools delivered a return of 4.2x the organisation's investment and that 60% of workers felt that the tools increased their performance.

Is a 4x ROI sufficient to encourage government departments to invest in better collaboration tools? I hope so - and look forward to more productive collaboration with my colleagues in the years to come.

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Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Heathcote community vote on stimulus spending now open

NSW MP Paul Macleay has opened voting on projects to receive a portion of the economic stimulus package allocated to his electorate, Heathcote.

To view how this example of community budgetting works, visit Paul's site at www.paulmcleay.com.au.

Note that you must live within the electorate to participate.

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Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Community based budgeting being trialled by a NSW Local MP

Community-based budgeting is an approach that involves a government allowing its constituents to nominate how some or all of the government's budget is spent in either a binding or non-binding manner.

It's not a new approach - in fact it's been used for thousands of years in different forms around the world.

What is reasonably new is using online tools to facilitate the process. This has been used successfully in various places around the world, (including Brazil) including at local council level in Australia.

However, for the first time that I'm aware of in Australia, the approach is about to be trialled at a state government level in NSW by Heathcote MP Paul McLeay.

The approach was announced via his website with a video, which details how the process will work.

It has also been the subject of a post by Paul at ON LINE Opinion titled, Web 2.0: citizens choose how to spend public money.

The article attracted criticism from the Sydney Morning Herald over the authors' choice of words regarding the Premier of NSW's use of Twitter. However it should also be noted that the quote was misattributed as only being from MP Paul McLeay, not from all of the authors, and the Herald didn't mention the point of the initiative in the first place.

However the experiment in edemocracy has attracted more positive views from others who have focused on the initiative, such as from Online Community Engagement's post Paul McLeay's e-democracy initiative - 3 cheers from us but the Herald is not impressed!.

I often wonder how the Australian public would prefer to spend 'government' budgets - the money that taxpayers give to the government to be used in their benefit.

Even with the understanding that the community won't have all the same information on which to make their decisions it would still make an interesting experiment to see the choices they make and the reasons behind their decisions.

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